Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  This city will be the death of me, Doris thought as she scrubbed the barroom flags with soda-wash and bored the scullery maid into a coma with her lectures on personal hygiene and frequent hand-washing. The fates of the stricken families chilled her worse than frostbite, yet not once did she think of abandoning the St Cuthbert for her sister’s farm near Harrowgate, as Beth had begged her to do.

  Bethesda, who had married well and was profitably widowed in less than five years, who now held the management of three hundred acres with its four tenant farms. Beth, who hated Wyke—filthy Wyke, she called it—who hated the inn, who hated still more the sight of Doris working the taproom and kitchen alongside her servants. Servants, Beth might well have added and most likely had, employed at rates that could not be judged as anything but detrimental to her sister’s own interests.

  Most of all she hated the fact that Doris had never come to her for help.

  Doris and Beth had always been different, even as children, Beth with her hankering for finery and Doris with her constant wandering, as if she’d been searching, even then, for the place where her habit of speaking her mind would cause least offence.

  Beth was scared of Doris’s imaginings and Doris found the company her sister moved in unutterably dull. Yet there have been times, Doris has to admit, when she finds herself missing her: the closeness they shared without ever naming it, all the ways of knowing the other that could never be replaced and never, though she might often wish it, escaped.

  Could it be this longing for sisterhood that has drawn her so to Saira, the bare-faced, obstinate girl who appeared before her in the barroom one evening in nothing but the clothes she stood up in—an old gardener’s smock that reached her knees and covering what Doris realised with shock to be a postulant’s habit.

  I have left the Abbey for good, Saira said, staring Doris full in the face as if to head off her challenge before it arrived. I was told you might find a place for me. I’m not afraid of work.

  As different from Beth as salt was from coal, and yet the feeling of Saira about the place takes Doris back to her girlhood, to when the thought of being apart—of growing apart—from Beth was like the thought of death: so distant and incomprehensible it could be safely ignored.

  The pestilence here, and Saira gone, such a foul exchange. Derenrice, who has to deal each day with mutineers and pickpockets, with drunks and thieves and charlatans of every kind, lambasts herself for her foolishness, for allowing herself to forget the world’s duplicity, even for an hour.

  She asks Padraig, who looks after the wood store, to make enquiries as to the whereabouts of Gideon Marchmain.

  Don’t let on who’s asking. I don’t want him scuttling back into the woodwork like the louse he is.

  Doris does not believe young Marchmain to be a louse, and if there is harshness in her voice it is on account of Saira, of the fear she keeps suppressing that she is already lost. Marchmain irks her through his naiveté, that is all. The lad is gifted, no doubt about it, yet seems oblivious to the dangers that surround him. The words constantly on his lips—my father this, my father that—as if Wilfrid Marchmain’s money and status could afford a body protection of their own accord.

  Doris has come to think of fate as a player of games, and in the matter of judging the stakes, fate is a master. The higher the stakes, the greater the risk, yet being dealt the upper hand does not mean risk is nullified: Wilfrid Marchmain has both money and the ear of the king, but he is still just a man.

  For two days Doris hears nothing of Marchmain, long enough for her to begin to doubt herself, to wonder if the rumours are true after all, that Saira and Gideon have left the city together. Either that or the student prince has been murdered also. She pushes the thought aside, and on the third day at dusk, with the barroom crammed with strangers and Doris heaving the slops out to the pigpen simply to afford herself a rest from the incessant din, a figure approaches. His features are shadowed by the hood of a cloak, a voluminous thing from a story of wizards and spies.

  Paddy tells me you’ve been searching for Saira, the figure whispers. He says you glimpsed her at Ravensword, the night of the storm.

  Doris wipes her fingers on her apron, puts her hands on her hips.

  I told Pat not to tell you who was asking.

  Paddy said nothing. Not before I asked him. He’s done nothing wrong.

  Where is Saira, Gideon? Have you spoken with her lately?

  He shakes his head, and Doris thinks how naked he looks, how sorrowful, and this in spite of his book-smarts and that ridiculous cape. She remembers how his mother perished, falling from horseback when her curly-headed boy was but eight years old. Gideon is like her, everyone says so. Weakened by fancy and a dearth of labour. A lover of poems.

  I have been frantic, Mrs Beynes, since the night of the flood. Saira told me she had made a discovery, that there was someone she needed to speak with, a physician, a confidante of the Mother Superior at the Abbey. Saira still keeps friendships among the nuns. She visits them sometimes, in secret. She believes I do not know this, but I do.

  A discovery, says Derenrice. What did she find?

  I do not know. She assured me she would explain everything once she had spoken with Mother Clare—but I have not had sight of her since that evening, since she set out. The boy shakes his head again. She did declare that Wyke is a city built on ruins, and that those that were here before us knew all about the plague.

  That Saira had been entrusted to the Order on account of the pestilence was no secret. To keep her safe, her father insisted. As explanation it was true enough but only half of the truth. Saira’s twin brothers had died of the plague within an hour of each other. Her mother had not been right since, crippled by grief not so much in her body as in her mind. There was no space for Saira in this straitened world, so she was sent away. Prenticed and later assistant to Sister Ursula, whose ability with lettering is famous throughout the city.

  The plague has taken her old life, but it has granted her a new one. Learning the letters with Sister Ursula has made Saira who she is.

  Such riddles are beautiful in their symmetry, though they be harsh. A reminder that the truth of the world is elusive, and hard to decipher. That there is more to Wyke than can be seen on the surface is self-apparent. But this talk of secrets and a cure for the plague? To Doris such claims have the ring of wishes: illusions with as little substance as fairy gold.

  What she saw on the night of the storm, though—that was real. First there came Saira, calling to her through the kitchen hatchway that she had need to go out, she had business to attend to, she would be back before closing time.

  Business, Doris had smiled to herself. It was her lad she was after seeing, the Marchmain boy. Doris had no objection to Saira taking time off, though she had concern for her gadding about the streets on a foul night like this.

  The wind’s getting up, she called back. Be sure and take care. Her memory plays tricks at this point. Was she worried about the storm or about some other thing? Would she have paid heed to the weather at all had it not been for Rodney Doyle, first mate aboard the Saskatchewan, hunkered down in his corner not saying a word. When Doris asked him how he was faring, he had shaken his head. Shaken his head then said there was a storm brewing, he could feel it in his bones.

  A storm unlike other storms, he added. A storm like the wrath of God and the fire of the devil.

  You ships’ fools, Doris had said, trying to jounce him from his gloom. You thrive on such catastrophes. The recounting of them, anywise.

  She had refilled his tankard free of charge, yet the man had just stared at her, as if the calamity in his mind’s eye had already occurred, the memory of a disaster he had failed to avoid.

  Shutter your windows, he had said quietly. I have heard the wind telling tales and they are not kind. He slurped at his replenished ale, spooned his mouth full of stew. There are boats at sea this eve that will not see landfall.

  When Doris went out to the wood stack
she found the wind had raked off the tarpaulin and the rain had started: swift, cutting shafts of it, bright as icicles and as sharp, the kind of evil autumn downpour best observed from the comfort of the chimney corner.

  There was no one abroad, which made sense, yet still the foulness of the wind in the empty alleyways struck her as eerie.

  She turned to go back inside, and it was then she saw them: two figures, with a third between, a third being dragged like a sack of potatoes along the lane that tracked west from behind the coachyard towards the fish market then on to Ravensword, all the way to Spurn Head if you followed it far enough, though Doris had not been to the coast herself since she was a girl.

  She was soaked through already, the power of the downpour increasing even as she stood there as if it meant to drive her back inside through sheer evil-mindedness. And yet Doris stood firm, shoving her sopping hair back from her face again and again as she strained not to lose sight of them in the darkness, these furtive figures, for that was how they seemed to her: furtive, a word that chimed with the filthy night yet stood at odds with it, too. How could one be furtive when there was no one in sight to give a damn what you were about? When the need to be out of the rain would have banished the curiosity of the meanest gossip?

  Doris stepped forward, her soaked dress slapping against her thighs and ankles like a flap of torn sail. The glow from the carriage light turned the rain in its circle to the form of one creature, a million fragments shimmeringly unified, a liquid-limbed beast.

  Hello, Doris called, too timidly, her voice stuffed instantly back in her mouth by the bullying wind. Yet surely there was something about the middle figure, the one being dragged, that made her sick inside with the thought that it was someone she knew. She tugged herself free from the safety of the yard and ran into the lane. The trio were far ahead of her, and even as she raced to catch up with them they drew further away. Hello, she called again, her cry snagging on the wind before being torn away, weightless and insubstantial as a hank of wool.

  Some part of her yell must have carried, though. The figure on the right, the one that hulked, seemed to hesitate for an instant before hurrying on. The set of its shoulders, the firmness of its bearing, its striding gait put Derenrice in mind of someone, though the name of William Dearborn the witchfinder did not come to her until she was stripping off her sodden garments before the stove. Doris gritted her teeth against the wind and lowered her head. The pursuit was madness, caused by phantoms, doing her head in. She began trudging back down the hill, her clothing streaming so with stormwater that the idea of bothering to pick up her pace seemed an unholy joke against herself.

  As she came in sight of the yard she stumbled against something heavy and nearly went down. A loose cobblestone, she thought, then realised as the object slid away from her that it was something less solid. Dark and oddly shaped. A leather boot.

  Without fully understanding her purpose, Doris snatched it up. What use is a single boot, except maybe as mending-leather? Then the coldness grinding her marrow deepened still further: the yellow stitching and tassel, the coneyskin cuff. This was Saira’s shoe she was holding, cast carelessly aside. Yet who would lose a shoe in the rain and not hurry back for it?

  One who could not hurry back, you fool. A prisoner or a corpse. A body dragged between two captors along a windswept road.

  And the wind was beginning to scream, a lunatic howling. The storm itself has taken her, Doris thought. Her fingers, gripping the boot-cuff, felt icy and stiff and lifeless as sticks of bone.

  On the third day, after speaking with Gideon, Doris leaves Clarah in charge of the barroom and goes to see Beth. She will be absent three days at the minimum, and with the roads in their present condition it will likely be longer.

  If anyone’s asking, I’m away to aid my sister, nothing more to it than that. The fare to Harrowgate is a thorn in her side but Doris has the coin, thank God. The management of the inn takes all of her and as she seats herself in the conveyance she wonders when was the last time she travelled further than her own back yard? When chanced she to purchase for herself a new gown or cloak, a silver chain, a pamphlet of those baffling poems so much admired by Gideon Marchmain?

  For the lark a speeding arrow through the sun, the toad adoring the lark brings the world to fluid life in the cradle of her dreams.

  Claptrap, young people today, yet the words still dance, flickering and swirling like dust motes in the stuffy vastness of a sun-warmed barn. Doris thinks of the stream that marks the boundary of her childhood home, bannered with toads’ eggs in spring, she and Beth waist-deep in water, their skinny arms beribboned with its glossy beads.

  The fat toad that dwells in the cellar, Doris calls him Mister Goldeneye. She has warned Padraig, who has a fear of cold creatures, that she will let him go on the spot if the beast comes to harm…

  The steady rhythm of the conveyance, lulling her to drowsiness and unkempt thoughts. On her lap lies Saira’s prayer book, her prentice piece, together with the other book, the one Doris found by accident, the book that has no business in existing. Yet now she has it in her possession, she finds it comforts her. The faded roan of the cloth-bound covers, the frightful candour of the words within—she will not whisper them even to herself, yet the brazen heresy of what the book contains seems somehow to offer the hope that Saira is alive.

  Such fires do not go out. Doris moves her lips silently, remembering how she rushed to Saira’s room at the height of the storm in the hope of finding the second boot. Kicked out of sight beneath the bed, say, or nosed up against the wall. Not to be, not to be. She sat down on the narrow cot tucked under the eaves, the roof tiles lifting and settling like sticks of raffia, placing the boot she had rescued from the street on the floor beside her like a piece of treasure trove. This must count as evidence, Doris assured herself, then felt the tears starting. You found a clapped-out boot in the street, woman. So what?

  The prayer book was lying on top of the chest where Saira kept her linens, the other book beside it. The simple fact of it, lying there so openly—as if the witchfinder and his instruments of torture took up so little space in her mind they were of no account.

  Bravery, or foolishness, the simple-minded valour of the young and righteous? More than anything, Doris hankers to show what she has found to Beth. Beth who knows nothing of Saira Gidding, or Gideon Marchmain, though she will surely ken his father. Of the Witchfinder Dearborn she will have heard the usual stories. The whole country hates the man.

  Doris will have to begin the tale from scratch, from the moment Saira arrived in the barroom asking for work. Beth had a child born dead, then a husband lost to the plague. Hammer-blows enough to forge a woman to steel. Such a long time since they have spoken—spoken in earnest. Such firebrands they were in their girlhood—Passion, and Wisdom. Should Doris have sent word on ahead, to tell her sister of her coming? She imagines Beth’s scorn, that Doris could think of entrusting her distress and suspicions to such a clod as Justice Treacher, and feels there is no need.

  There are trees down, roads blocked. At Tadcaster she leaps from the carriage to help the driver and his man saw and clear the twisted branches of a fallen oak. And yet away from the coast it is clear the predations of the storm have been less extreme.

  She sees the farmhouse at last from the road, its frost-grey outline jutting starkly against the horizon. Doris’s heart, in spite of itself, leaps up. She asks the coachman to set her down at the familiar turning and then shoulders her baggage. When she comes properly in sight of the house, she is astounded to see Beth already on the doorstep, awaiting her arrival. Standing beside her, her dove-coloured pinafore neatly patched with a purple square, is Saira Gidding.

  I took my chance when the waves overwhelmed the defences at Ravensword, Saira explains, and they lost me in the storm. I know a place in the Abbey wall where, so long as you can squeeze yourself small, you can slip inside. Mother Clare put up the funds for my passage to Harrowgate. By good fortune she knew of
Beth, and where I should find her. She told me I should take refuge here to wait for you and now you are come.

  Beth and Doris gaze at one another like rival privateers, forced into a nervous alliance by the presence of the customsmen: Yes we are sisters and haven’t we always been? This is our story and we’re inclined to stick to it, thank you very much. Who can say where habit leaves off and love begins? Doris feels she is nine years old again, cooking up some piece of innocent subterfuge to outwit their father.

  I can’t abide that William Dearborn, Beth is saying. Who died and made him Lord High Executioner all of an instant, that’s what I’d like to know.

  Doris is so relieved and incredulous at seeing Saira that her breath seems to stop. Is this what it feels like, to give birth to a daughter? She thinks of the child Beth lost and her heart wants to break.

  Listen, Saira says to them both. We have much talking to do.

  The leaves of the book are fragile, their parchment so dry and so brittle Doris fears that even a stubborn glance might reduce them to dust. The War from the Air, the treatise is called. The Bombardment of Kings-town, Nineteen-forty to Nineteen-forty-five. Doris moves her lips slowly, testing the phrases, stumbling over bombardment because although Doris can read and read well, she is more used to perusing the butcher’s monthly invoice than forbidden texts, and bombardment is a word you do not encounter every day.

  There is an image on an inside page, of a church on fire. The picture’s tones are like ghost’s breath: monochrome, shadowy, the image’s likeness to the building so exact it’s as if the burning edifice is blazing in front of her. Doris finds herself speechless with the wrongness of it, because the outline of the church is familiar to her, the ruined and patched and patched-again Church of Saint Margaret in the Mercantile, on Brasenose Hill.

  Tell me how this can be. She feels cast adrift in time, as if the world were hanging above her, a moon-sized lump of granite that might break its invisible bounds at any moment, extinguishing her like a beetle to a scant puff of dust.